Boston Red Sox Win World Series

Baseball is an industry. The customers are the fans who buy tickets to see the game, or spend money in other ways (food, alcohol, shirts, general donations). To obtain higher profits, a team needs more fans. (Public funds often go to baseball teams as well which also represent fans. Thus, teams are usually based in large cities to encourage a great many people to come see the team play. New York has had an advantage as it is such a large city, by default there are a lot of fans which come to see the games, providing them a large profit (so much so, that the large city can support two baseball teams). The suppliers are the players on the baseball team, which must be paid highly for there services.

To have a high fan base to get high profits, either the city has to be large (like New York) or have another tactic or theme to gain a lot of fans. For Boston, the theme was "the Curse of Bambino". This curse made a cohesive force for the people of Boston and made them extreme fans. This curse was Boston's competitive advantage. Thus, people came to see them because they lose. (Other teams have many fans because they always win, since it is always fun to watch a winner.) Boston enjoyed revelling in their misery, shouting "Yankee's suck" no matter whom they were playing against.

But now Boston has won the world series, which gave them a short term large amount of fans. But the question is what will be Boston's strategy from now on? They have lost the "curse" which functioned as their past competitive advantage. They have little option now but to try for the "winner" tactic for gaining fans, which is much more difficult to do. Such a huge change in brand will be extremely difficult to do successfully. It is unclear whether they will be able to do it. I predict that in the coming years we will see a significant downturn in the number of Boston fans and thus profit if they do not continue to win the world series every few years.